One project. A full year. Three people who did this last season.
The hardest part of this job is talking students out of their first idea. When a project dies in March, the cause of death is usually October: a question too big for a school year, or a design that was never going to carry the claim everyone wanted it to make. We would rather kill three of your ideas in September than watch the fourth one die in spring.
After that, we are in it. When an experiment collapses in February and the regional is in March, that is the call we take.
This is the only engagement where we are there before the question is settled.
What the year actually looks like
- We pressure-test every question you bring and tell you which ones a year cannot answer
- We design backwards from the claim you want to make, so the analysis can carry it
- We are on the phone when an experiment fails, not scheduled for the following Tuesday
- We tell you which competitions this work belongs in, and which ones would waste your spring
- We rebuild your figures against the six-foot standard until a stranger can read them across a booth
- We run the walk-up and the second pass until your answers hold under someone trying to break them
- We fly out when being in the room changes something
We advise. The student does the research.
Excellent research and excellent competition performance are different problems.
It starts with the opening read: we go through the project exactly as a judge will meet it, and tell you what is genuinely strong, what is vulnerable, what you are underselling, and which claims your evidence does not actually support. Families sometimes find this hard. It is the most useful hour we spend together.
Then we build the competitive expression of the work — where it should be entered, how the same study should be framed for a chemistry panel versus a biomedical one, and what happens at the booth.
The underlying research does not change. Everything around it does.
What we take apart, and rebuild
- The opening read — an honest position on how this lands, before anyone spends a season on it
- Category strategy, because the same project wins in one and disappears in another
- Your figures against the six-foot standard, and your display as a judge walks the aisle
- The abstract, against the rules as they are written this year rather than last
- The walk-up: the first thirty seconds, which most students have never rehearsed
- Adversarial questioning, including the question you are hoping nobody asks
- The second pass, when a judge comes back and the answer has to be the same
Send us the project exactly as it stands. Not as you plan to fix it.
We read it the way we would read it across a booth, and we write down every weakness, ambiguity, unsupported claim and likely line of questioning we find. Then we sit down with you and go through all of it.
This is the smallest thing we sell and the least we can be useful with. It is also the honest way to find out whether you want us for the rest of it.
One read. No ongoing engagement, and no obligation to take one.
What you get back
- An independent read of the finished project, by the founding partners
- A written assessment — specific, and not written to spare anyone's feelings
- The questions we expect a judge to ask, including the ones you will not want
- A private session to work through all of it